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October 2002 | Volume 60 | Number 2
Marge Scherer
Table of Contents
Diane Ravitch
How should the schools balance the teaching of patriotism with instruction designed to improve students' international understanding? To address this question, the author proposes seven lessons that American educators should have learned from the terrorist attacks of September 11. She argues that: 1). It's OK to be patriotic. 2). Not all cultures share our regard for equality and human rights. 3). We must now recognize the presence of evil in the world. 4). Pluralism and divergence of opinion are valuable. 5). Knowledge of American history is important. 6). Knowledge of world history and geography is important. 7). We must teach students to appreciate and defend our democratic institutions.
Ross E. Dunn
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Deborah Perkins-Gough, Sally Lindfors and Don Ernst
Sir John Daniel, Assistant Director-General for Education of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), talked with ASCD staff members about UNESCO's efforts to improve education worldwide. On the basis of his contacts with ministers of education around the world, Daniel concludes that many countries are placing increased importance on educating students to live together. He describes some of UNESCO's activities, including mediating among countries that are trying to develop mutually acceptable instruction materials and producing teacher training resources such as a recently released CD-ROM “Educating for Citizenship.” Daniel urges the United States to rejoin UNESCO because, “The absence of the world's most developed country from the forum where important educational, cultural, and scientific issues are discussed is a problem.”
Merry M. Merryfield
Every day, global educators make instructional decisions that profoundly influence their students' understanding of other cultures and global issues. Drawing on examples of units on the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia, the author shows how global educators help students address stereotypes, explore multiple perspectives, examine how power shapes worldviews, and directly experience cross-cultural learning.
Linda Nathan
By integrating their study of art, academics, and life, Boston Arts Academy students experience the joys and responsibilities of becoming citizens of the world. The author, headmaster of the Academy since its inception five years ago, describes students' study of China through dance; the school's four-year humanities sequence, which includes a multidisciplinary approach to immigration; the senior project, which combines art and academic skills to respond to a community need; and the school's response to a specific hate incident. She concludes that the school's graduates can empathize with differences feel a sense of responsibility to help others become citizens of the world through the lens of art.
Cerylle A. Moffett
Since 1961, over 165,000 men and women have served in the Peace Corps in more than 130 countries, where they live and work in remote villages and cities and towns—and they write. Coverdell World Wise Schools has collected several narratives by returned Peace Corps Volunteers in Voices from the Field: Reading and Writing about the World, Ourselves, and Others, a curriculum resource designed for use by teachers in grades 7–12. The narratives represent a variety of genres and cultures. The curriculum section of Voices contains lesson plans that help students find personal meaning in the stories while broadening their perspectives about other cultures and strengthening their reading comprehension, literary interpretation, and writing skills. Many lesson plans focus on the Peace Corps authors' craft and culminate in students writing their own personal narratives.
Susan L. Douglass
In a national study to determine how state and national content standards include teaching about religion, the Council on Islamic Education and the First Amendment Center found that standards generally do a good job of incorporating this topic into social studies, language, literature, and fine arts. Implementing the standards in classroom instruction, however, is a different matter. The author suggests guidelines for setting religion in a meaningful context in the curriculum, so that instruction can “transcend the trivial and exotic in favor of meaningful understandings and universal principles.”
Andrew F. Smith
In spite of improvements in global education during the past two decades, educators and policymakers still face challenges—and now an urgent need—to educate globally literate citizens. The author reviews major improvements that have taken place in global education: more and better foreign language, geography, and world history curriculums; an increasing number of new public schools with an international focus; and new extracurricular activities and technological advances that make direct communication with students and teachers in other countries possible. The challenges include more research and better preparation for preservice and inservice teachers. The author argues that a better educated citizenry is crucial for confronting future global issues.
Gail McGoogan
Students in a 1st–5th grade vertical team participate in a 24-hour-long videoconferencing project that connects them to students around the world. To prepare for the project, students research countries, calculate appropriate contact times, e-mail schools around the world, and compile questions for their international peers about their lives, customs, and worldwide environmental concerns. During the culminating activity, students, teachers, and dozens of parent volunteers spend all night at the school videoconferencing with their new international friends.
Nancy A. Bacon and Gerrit A. Kischner
The goal of the global curriculum is to broaden students' perspectives, ensuring that they understand that facts themselves are often a matter of one's point of view and that culture is a matter of individual experience within a given context. Students begin to view themselves as global citizens in a rapidly changing world when they encounter, compare, experience, and adopt multiple international perspectives. But how do students get there? Teachers greatly enhance the global curriculum when they look beyond textbooks and draw on rich, real-world resources to help them develop students' global perspectives. Examples of the global curriculum in action include in-depth country and culture studies, international partner school and e-mail buddy programs, international visitor programs, and community partnerships that bring students together with others from around the world to discuss key global themes and issues.
Martin Skelton, Andrew Wigford, Pam Harper and Graham Reeves
Using lessons they learned from their experience in developing the International Primary Curriculum for international schools in countries around the world, the authors offer advice for educators who want to develop a more rigorous approach to international education for elementary-level students in their school or district. They emphasize the importance of reaching agreement on the definition of international mindedness, developing learning standards for international understanding, designing curriculum activities to support the standards, modeling appropriate behaviors, and including international mindedness in assessment.
Niki Singh
The International Baccalaureate Organisation's Primary Years Programme is a curricular framework for 3- to 12-year-olds developed by teachers at international schools. Central to the Programme is its student profile, which reflects the 10 attributes of an international person. In essence, international people are inquirers, thinkers, communicators, risk takers, knowledgeable, principled, caring, open-minded, well- balanced, and reflective. Every other aspect of the curriculum, then, focuses on moving students toward becoming people who reflect these characteristics. Programme schools focus on a thematic, concept-based curriculum; the study of additional languages; and the development of students' mother tongues.
Elizabeth R. Howard
Two-way immersion education is an educational approach that aims to foster in students a deep awareness and appreciation of the world's cultural and linguistic diversity. Its programs integrate language-majority students (native English speakers) and language-minority students (non-native English speakers) in the classroom by means of a bilingual curriculum that incorporates the languages and cultures of both groups through such instructional strategies as cooperative learning and the use of additive bilingual instruction models. Two-way immersion programs share three goals: 1). All students will perform on grade level academically. 2). All students will develop high levels of language and literacy ability in their first and second languages. 3). All students will develop positive cross-cultural attitudes. Research indicates that two-way immersion education indeed meets these goals.
Claudia Zaslavsky
How did the Incas add and subtract? Why were round houses popular in some African societies? What would an adult-size Barbie doll look like? Answering questions like these through interactive projects in math class increases students' interest in learning, awareness and appreciation of different cultures, and, ultimately, analytical thinking about their own society. A growing body of literature on ethnomathematics, the relationship between mathematics and culture, provides guidance to teachers introducing cultural perspectives into math classes.
Ahmet Saban
At Esentepe Elementary School in Turkey, teachers adopted Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences theory as a strategy for personalizing their students' education. They began by testing their own intelligences and moved on to organizing their observations about children in the classroom. Armed with this knowledge and a strong commitment to reaching each student, they developed a project-based approach to learning and added special Friday afternoon “exploratories” that help students use their strongest intelligences while developing their weakest ones in a variety of activities. As a result, teachers have learned the value of drawing on one another's strengths and have created a school that has caught the attention of parents and the local media.
Alex Molnar
The author reports the results of the fifth annual survey of commercialism in public schools, conducted by the Education Policy Studies Laboratory's Commercialism in Education Research Unit. The survey of media reports from July 1, 2001 through June 30, 2002 found that references to corporate sponsorship of programs and activities showed a distinct increase. The article cites examples of schools and districts that have sold corporations the right to put their names and logos on school buildings, gymnasiums, libraries, and instructional materials. Reports of other categories of commercial activity—such as exclusive agreements, fund-raising, and electronic marketing—have leveled off or declined, according to the survey. Even so, the author expresses grave ethical concerns about the pervasiveness of schoolhouse commercialism.
Ronit Bogler
During insecure and unstable times, principals are often confronted with public pressure to ensure school safety, a challenging task often fulfilled at the cost of the school's true educational mission. Clearly, principals may balance providing a safe environment with providing educational leadership to faculty and students, but as they become more concerned with satisfying the community's expectations for school security, they may find themselves less available for the “real” educational work. Education leaders should remember the importance of sustaining their schools' visions, and not substitute school security for crucial resources more appropriate to educational settings.
John H. Holloway
Steven C. Schlozman
Deborah Perkins-Gough
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